A Transportation and Land Use Blog

More Albuquerque

Yesterday’s post got me thinking about more aspects of population and metropolitan areas. I decided to examine the relationship between the population of metropolitan areas and the population of each area’s core city. Basically, I wanted to know how Salt Lake City‘s population of 189,314 comprising only 8.1% of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area’s population of 2,350,274 ranks among other metropolitan areas. I put together the following table of metropolitan areas exceeding a half million in population and figured out how much of their populations were comprised of their core cities. Some core cities, like Colorado Springs, El Paso, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi comprise more than 60% of their metropolitan area populations. Surprisingly though were some of the cities on the other end of the spectrum. Atlanta, Miami, and Boston each comprise smaller portions of their metropolitan areas than does Salt Lake City.